Destiny’s Story “Left Something To Be Desired”, Says Activision CEO

The original Destiny was roundly criticized for a fair few things- but chief among those criticisms was the story. The game had hinted at a great narrative, lore, and backstory, almost none of which made it into the final game.

Speaking to VentureBeat, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg admitted that the story of the original game had underwhelmed, but that that was something they were looking at addressing with the sequel. “Destiny had so many towering strengths. It was so engaging, so fresh, so innovative, a new genre. But we’ll all freely admit that the story left something to be desired,” he said.” We had some areas to improve there. We wanted to lead with a great narrative and great characters you’ll connect with on an emotional level. The strategy was to lead with, “Hey, I wanna hang out with those guys. I want to fight in that battle. I want to be a part of that world.”

“Those two cinematic assets we put out about a month before the event were two of our most highly engaging assets we’ve ever created in Destiny’s history. Then, because we led with storytelling at that first beat, when we got to the event we had all of our gameplay powder dry. We just had a tremendous amount of content, an hour’s worth of content on stage, and hands-on content to show at the reveal.”

This is good to know- hopefully, Bungie knocks it out of the park, and delivers the kind of engaging storytelling that it used tok be known for back in the days when it used tok work on Halo.